Terminix Stable 1.2.0 Released

[Matthias Klumpp via Digitalmars-d-announce]

On Saturday, 23 July 2016 at 11:40:20 UTC, qsdjlf wrote:
> [...]
> integration in distribution could be a good signal, what a say, 
> Excellent signal, for the D language. I know that some people 
> here are mostly starving at commercial usage...but for me such 
> tools written in D and available in linux distros via their 
> package manager would be a much more significant sign.

It is also something that brings people to D - a good toolchain 
and many projects using D and being established in Linux 
distributions is a *huge* influence.

Unfortunately, D is still a bit painful in Linux distros.
Those issues should be resolved to make integration easier:

1) Stable ABI for the D language which ideally also works across 
compilers

2) Fixing dub bugs and adding features - at time, dub is pretty 
unusable for distro packaging, which is why we use Terminix' 
Automake support.
Specifically, these issues need to be addressed:
  - Find & use system dub packages: 
https://github.com/dlang/dub/issues/838
  - Make dub compile by-file and not compile everything with one 
compiler command (for very large projects this makes 
parallelization hard and can also bring down less powerful build 
slaves)
  - Add "dub install" to install a project: 
https://github.com/dlang/dub/issues/839
  - "dub test" shouldn't override the main binary, otherwise we 
can't run tests properly in distros at compile-time: 
https://github.com/dlang/dub/issues/840

3) Making LDC available for more architectures, or making GDC 
support a higher version of the Phobos standard library and build 
shared libraries.
At time, LDC is the better fit because of shared library support 
and higher Phobos version. Current D projects are hard to compile 
with GDC because of the latter reason.
More architectures are not per-se essential, but would be awesome 
to have. This feature request summarizes the status of arch 
support for D in free compilers: 
https://github.com/ldc-developers/ldc/issues/1636

4) Resolving weird LDC bugs like this one: 
https://github.com/ldc-developers/ldc/issues/1618 - might 
actually be an LLVM issue, but I don't know enough to pin down 
the issue.

5) Have hardening supported for the D compilers: 
https://wiki.debian.org/HardeningWalkthrough

6) Ideally have the free D compilers agree on a common set of 
compiler options, like clang supports gcc compiler flags. That 
allows distros to apply compiler flags globally, e.g. to enable 
hardening.

Of these points 1, 2 and 4 are very important, 3 would be really 
nice to have and 5 and 6 would be going the extra mile to make D 
awesome in distros and us as distribution vendors really happy.